Note: To participate in the "study" pillar of Dominican life, the St Martin de Pores chapter (Austin) of Lay Dominicans in the Southern (US) Province is currently reading Fr George Montague's Holy Spirit, Make your Home in Me one chapter at a time, with one member presenting a reflection of the chapter during the meeting. This last meeting was my turn to present, and the chapter was titled Abba. Here then is my reflection.

We are studying a book about the Holy Spirit, yet this reflection is about Abba, the Father. The two are distinct Persons of the Trinity, so the first questions which I asked myself before beginning this meditation is this: why, in a book about the Holy Spirit, are we reading a chapter by the title of Abba? Seeing that the next chapter is given the title Jesus, my curiosity was piqued further.

Note: This is the second of a set of Lenten reflections on the heresies which have fought against and been fought by the Church. The first one can be read here

“For such false apostles are deceitful workmen, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no wonder: for Satan himself transformeth himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers be transformed as the ministers of justice, whose end shall be according to their works” ( 2 Corinthians 11:13-15)

Saint Paul warned the early Christian community in Corinth to be on guard against the wiles of the devil. Though many signs and miracles would be performed in the name of Christ, so too would there be signs performed which were not in His name. Such signs could seem to be under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and to point those who saw them to God; yet the Devil himself was once an angel of light, and so he can disguise himself as such. Similarly can he work some types of miracle through those who follow him, in order to dupe the faithful and lure them away from the Faith.

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."
--Saint Thomas Aquinas

Since today is the feast day of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a few words of wisdom from him are in order. In school, St Thomas was often teased by his peers, who though him to be dumb--they called him "the dumb ox"--yet ironically he was one of the greatest thinkers ever to live. To return bring the irony full circle, let me note that everybody thought I was a smart person in school, and now I will add my own thoughts, which will be considerably less enlightening than those of St Thomas.

I have said before that faith is like a pair of glasses--it really does alter one's perception of the world. Things which were once muddled can become clear, and things which were lost in the blur become visible. Gaining (or losing) one's faith really does change how one views the world. The change is rarely overnight--it's often gradual--but such things have happened before. Sometimes the change is not so much in what we see, but how we interpret it.

Chesterton once remarked that a heretic is unable to truly have an original thought. His point was that the heretic was too busy tearing down to ever really build up, and it's certainly a good point to consider. In my own experience, however, the heretic's problem is not that he never has an original thought, but rather that once he has that singular thought he can think of nothing else.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object? Or more properly phrased, what happens when an unstoppable object collides with an unmovable object? This question seems like a bit of a logical stumper, until one realizes that it is sheer nonsense. An unmovable object and an unstoppable force cannot simultaneously exist. Within in the bounds of the laws of physics and of mathematics, neither object can exist, for an unmovable object would necessitate an infinite amount of inertia, and thus infinite mass; and an unstoppable object must have an infinite amount of momentum, which is possible only if the object has infinite mass or is traveling with a speed of c, that is, at the same speed as light traveling in a vacuum.

Mark Shea has a great little post on "asking questions." His post is, of course, closely related to the Church's teaching about the supremacy of conscience in making moral decisions. Namely, the conscience is the ultimate thing which we must obey, but that conscience must be informed--indeed, it must go through formation in general. That does, of course, involve asking questions, but all to often the questions are not exactly innocent:

There are quite a few sites and blogs which offer good advice concerning the sacrament of reconciliation. It seems to me that there are a number of priests (and even some lay people) who address this issue, each with his own advice to the penitent for how to best prepare for the sacrament (e.g. how to best examine one's conscience) and how to make a good confession when one has actually entered the confessional. Today, for the first time, I have finally found some bad advice concerning the sacrament, though it is of course doled out by a Protestant who would contest confession's sacramental nature.

When St Thomas Aquinas addressed the question of God's existence he could think of only two arguments against his position. On of those arguments was more against the ability of humans to know for certain that God exists, and thee other was the problem of evil (or suffering). Fast forward through the centuries to today, and modern atheists have added little to the problem of evil; at times, they have split suffering and evil into two categories, though generally suffering is classified as a form of evil; and occasionally attempts have been made to refute this or that argument for the existence of God (though a great many of these have been circular at best). Even the "scientific atheists," from Darwin to Russell to Weinberg, Dawkins, and the other "New Atheists" have based their atheism not on science but on the problem of evil.

A few days ago, I wrote a brief article about a difference of approach between Catholics and Protestants as concerns the practice of prayer. In particular, both Catholics and Protestants share much in common in their prayer styles, with this exception: that Catholics have, in addition to the many forms of prayer practiced by most Protestants, an additional form of prayer which is meditative in nature, and which is generally a form of adoration. Why does this difference exist? Why do Catholics so often have "additions" to the articles and practices of Protestant faith? It is more proper to ask why Protestants discarded so many articles and practices of the Catholic Faith. In any event, it always seems like Catholics meet the Protestant "either/or" with their own counterproposal: "both/and."

In which Fr Dwight Longenecker discusses fideism as opposed to rationalism. The two tendencies which he discusses are really opposite extremes between which is balanced the Catholic version of epistemology. We know that faith and reason are complementary, and thus that they do not contradict each other.

Of particular interest is this bit: